The Black Rod

  And just like that , "Blackface" Justin Trudeau, following in his father's footsteps, has turned Canada into a police state. Remember how two years ago we were "all in this together"? Nurses were heroes. Truckers were heroes (Trudeau said so).  Personal care home workers were heroes. Two years later, nurses are being fired. Care home workers are being fired. Truckers demonstrating for the right to work are arrested and demonized. Snipers are stationed on the rooftops in Ottawa ready to kill protestors. Police are roughing up anti-mandate teenagers in Steinbach with impunity while the "news" media turns a blind eye. During Black History Month politicians and pundits are extolling segregation. Trudeau has seized absolute power in Canada as the Opposition parties sit silent. Under the Emergencies Act  Trudeau can prohibit travel to or from anywhere in the country; he can seize your bank account without notice, he can even assume control of all public ut...

When it comes to Fake News, nobody can match Dan Lett, the "political columnist" for the Winnipeg Free Press. But he surpassed himself last Friday when he concocted a story accusing Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister of hiring a private investigator to "dig up dirt on NDP leader Wab Kinew" prior to the 2019 provincial election. The story was based on those apocryphal anonymous "sources" who, of course, "have asked not to be named for fear of reprisal." Given that Lett has been a shill for the NDP for months (more on that soon), coordinating his anti-Pallister columns with NDP political attacks, its not hard to figure out who his "sources" are. The Page One news story, carried under Lett's name with no mention of being 'opinion', continued on the jump page where, if one read that far, in paragraph 20 of the 28 paragraph story Lett conceded that the PI was actually a researcher hired to pour through the legal records of Kinew...

  Canada has a new hero. He's Artur Pawlowski, the pastor of Calgary's Street Church. On Easter weekend a band of six government thugs showed up at his church to stop the religious service declaring they were there to prevent the spread of Covid-19. For Pastor Pawlowski, it was too much. Sacriligious government intrusion into a church on the holiest days of the Christianity was a red line not to be crossed. Like an exorcist driving out demons, he confronted the menacing gang of officials. "OUT!" "OUT!" "GET OUT!" "GESTAPO IS NOT ALLOWED HERE!" "NAZIS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!" "GET OUT!" "DO NOT COME BACK WITHOUT A WARRANT!" At first, the authorities thought they could intimidate Pastor Pawlowski by standing their ground. But with parishioners rushing to his defence by filming the confrontation with a sea of cell phones, they conceded defeat, but not before showing their contempt by saunte...

  Early in the week we were watching a television news report on an anti-mask protest in Steinbach, when we heard possibly the stupidest comment ever spoken in Manitoba. The reporter (from Global TV if memory serves well) had plucked a young woman out to represent the anti-protest sentiment.  She said she recognized that the protest was about "individual rights" but, she continued, 'individual rights were not the mountain you want to die on.' WHAT????  We leaped out of our chairs as one. WHAT???? INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS LIKE THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH ARE EXACTLY THE MOUNTAIN YOU WANT TO DIE ON! we shouted. What made the shocking statement even more appalling was that it was made only days after Remembrance Day. You know, the day we set aside to honour the thousands who died fighting a world war to preserve individual rights.  And spoken only weeks before we mark the 30th anniversary of the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and the return, after 50 years, o...

The Grammy's, the Oscars, the Golden Globes.  It's awards season. Which reminded us we hadn't yet given out our last (dis)honour for 2018---Bozo of the Year. It's a category we introduced in 2013 when there was a bumper crop of contenders--Greg Selinger, Eric Robinson, Stan Struthers, Christine Melnick, and the eventual winner, University of Manitoba Professor Gary Stern who nosed out the policians by being so stupendously wrong with his scholarly declaration five years earlier that because of global warming the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013.  It's been ten years now and we're still waiting, Gary. The award has lain fallow for a few years, but it was time to revive it for 2018 because one candidate sprinted ahead of the pack and almost demanded the recognition.  So, without further ado, we present the winner of the Black Rod Bozo of the Year 2018 award to----David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Metis Federation. Chartrand spent the year imitating the c...

You know things are really slow in the news business when pundits are reduced to speculating on who will be the next leader of the Liberals in Manitoba, a bunch that hasn't elected enough MLA's to be an official party in the Legislature since 1995. And on who is running or not running to be leader of the NDP, a party repudiated so massively by the electorate that any conjectured return to government can be measured in decades, not years. The public would be better served by a discussion of who will replace Brian Pallister as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba---and hence  become Premier of the province---because Pallister's number is coming up fast.   Its not his age, although he will be 65 and collecting an old-age pension when the next provincial election rolls around.   No, Pallister's future will be determined next year---and you can spell it P-S-T.   A hike of the provincial sales tax by one percentage point doomed the ...

By now you've heard about Fake News. But the Winnipeg Free Press has taken the concept a step further and has introduced Fake Views . What's that, you ask?  Read on. The MSM is well aware that the news consuming public knows the tricks of Fake News and has no hesitation in outing biased opinion that's presented as "news".  The WFP gets called out every day on their comments pages. So the Free Press has decided to re-package fake news as opinion or viewpoints, or even 'analysis' to give themselves deniability when the public points out that the story spins like a top.  'It's not us, it's the writer's opinion,' they can safely bleat, they think. This weekend the FP ran a piece of "analysis" on their editorial pages headlined "Manitobans favour putting price on carbon." The title was so absurd, we had to read further. It turns out the piece was written by Curtis Brown, a familiar name to Winnipeggers.  He ...

Today we expect to see Manitoba voters deliver a historic repudiation of almost 16 years of NDP government. But incoming premier Brian Pallister is dead wrong if he thinks that just giving the scoundrels the boot is enough. The wolves have had free rein on the farm too long. By the end they had convinced themselves, like all despots, that they could do no wrong.  *  Trying to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Jockey Club to patch the depleted provincial budget *  Publicly supporting a racist cabinet minister who admitted to prejudice against whites, *  Shrugging off a stomach-churning account of a woman spending her final hours of life screaming in pain on the floor of a hospital emergency ward  The NDP saw any opposition as downright evil and having to be stamped out. By controlling the levers of power, the NDP were able to slough off one major scandal after another. That doesn't mean the scandals didn't exist.  But yo...